kirk minihane

New low for Boston Globe with amateurish takedown piece on WEEI

Full disclosure: I'm on the Dennis & Callahan show every day from 6-10 a.m., though regrettably it still remains in an undefined position.

See, Boston Globe? That wasn't so difficult, was it? Full disclosure. If I'm going to write a column blasting the Globe and Callum Borchers for its pathetic, agenda-driven, lazy, factually inaccurate and hideously dated takedown piece on WEEI from Thursday, I think it's important to note that I sit next to John and Gerry for 20 hours a week. If I don't, it's impossible to take seriously anything I write on the subject, the assumption would be that I'm hiding something or blinded by some bias.

Callum Borchers, the author of the story, was an intern at WEEI in 2006. He worked (wait for it) for the Dennis & Callahan show. Now, keep in mind -- this is a Page 1 story in the Boston Globe, and (in 2013, more importantly) a story that was the lead on Boston.com for most of the morning Thursday. You'd think any whiff of bias would be addressed, right? Nope. The story never mentions that Borchers was once an intern for Dennis & Callahan, a show that was a focal point in the piece, in fact the only WEEI program mentioned in the story. Why not? According to Borchers, the story wasn't a "first-person account," so such disclosure wasn't needed. Does that strike anyone as a believable response?

The story begins with the tale of Drew Mavrikos and his wavering devotion to WEEI. No problem, that's how it goes, if he likes another station or show better there are plenty of places to shop. Same goes, it would seem, for Jonas Osborne, a friend of Mavrikos who has "gone to The Sports Hub."

Again, I think a little disclosure would have served our author well. Osborne may or may not be friends with Mavrikos -- and we can get into how absurd it is to randomly pick out two listeners when reporting on the purported demise of a radio station -- but it sure seems he is friends with Borchers. The two have been friends on Facebook since March 2009.

I spoke to Borchers for 10 minutes on Thursday afternoon. He told me Osborne was more of an acquaintance, someone he had met at church. The two speak only occasionally, Borchers said, and it was sometimes about sports talk radio.

(However, a Facebook photo dated Aug. 17 -- posted by a Craig Pfizenmaier, a mutual Facebook friend of Borchers and Osborne, suggest that perhaps the two were more than merely acquaintances. The photo is taken at Gillette Stadium during the Patriots-Buccaneers preseason game, and the two are among a group of five with arms wrapped around each other for the picture. Borchers is second to the left and Osborne -- at least someone tagged as Jonas Osborne, and it leads to his Facebook page -- is on the far right. Multiple attempts were made to again contact Borchers after we learned of the picture, but he didn't respond.)

There are tens of thousands -- conservatively -- of people listening to both sports stations every day. And in a story about sports talk radio in Boston, Borchers elected to speak to and quote exactly two of those listeners. And at least one of those two was at least an acquaintance and we weren't told that was the case. Also, this was someone with an opinion on the subject that the author of the piece already was aware of going in, and yet it is presented as some random listener with no connection to the author. How is that possibly allowed?

It's amateur hour over at 135 Morrissey Boulevard. I'm not one of the great investigative minds of this generation, and it took me about an hour (with help from Chris Curtis, producer of the Dennis & Callahan show) to find out that Borchers was a former intern and that he has a connection to Osborne (who also is friends, remember, with Mavrikos). Did the editors and fact-checkers at the Globe simply not care? Were they negligent or inept? Either way, it's a disgraceful performance, intellectually and journalistically dishonest. True or not, it smells like a rejected high school newspaper pitch -- someone uses a couple of buddies for quotes that fit an agenda. And the Globe not only signed off on it, it put it on the front page of the newspaper. I can only imagine what didn't make the cut.

Look, if someone stepped up and wrote a sky-is-falling story about WEEI that was full of accurate numbers and free of bias, I'd be fine with it. And maybe that will happen, but this wasn't it. The sub-headline of the story Thursday suggests that the loss of the Celtics radio rights was part of the ongoing problem. Gerry Callahan and I disagreed -- the Celtics, over the next couple of years, are going to struggle and that will translate to low ratings -- and Borchers agreed with us, which means he disagrees with the sub-headline to his own story. Borchers reported that revenue for WEEI was $35.5 million in 2012, down from $44.2 million in 2007 but still some $20 million higher than The Sports Hub. We were able to get Borchers to tell us that on air, but he didn't disclose The Sports Hub revenue in his story. Why? Because it wasn't relevant. OK. The "critics" were mentioned when discussing how Dennis & Callahan exemplify the problems of the station, but no specific critic was ever named. And when we asked why certain things were omitted from the story, we were told that this wasn't a novel, there was only so much room.

Evidently also not enough room to let us all know about a couple of uncomfortable, embarrassing and unforgivable missteps in editorial judgment. The Boston Globe and Borchers set out to write about what's wrong with WEEI but showed us what is wrong with the Boston Globe. Of course, maybe I'm too close to the story.

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